Free Return to Dust by Andrew Lanh Page A

this woman have?
    I pulled out drawers, ran my fingers across the bottoms, and Karen, entering the living room where the little desk sat, bit her lip. Breathing in loudly, she glared at me as though I were a surprise prowler. Quirky, she obviously had an invisible boundary I was always crossing, something that baffled me. She may have hired me, but she looked unhappy that I was rifling through a dead woman’s life. Then she went back into the kitchen and I heard cupboards opening and closing. A dish broke, and she swore.
    I walked through the basement, the upstairs bedrooms, the attic crawlspace. Nothing out of the ordinary—no secret vices, no hidden cardboard box sealed with duct tape. This was a conventional lady, by all accounts. She paid her bills faithfully and didn’t touch that hundred grand from hubby’s insurance. I found a huge carton of Christmas cards from years past, each year’s arrival bound by elastic bands and each placed back in the original envelopes. She’d saved them all. Hundreds. The words inside were standard and hardly personal—the platitudinous “Have a great Christmas” sentiment. Yet something bothered me, and eventually I went back to check the addresses—every card was from a man. Not one was signed with a woman’s name. Did she know women? Yes, obviously, there was Hattie Cozzins, for one. Her travel companion. But no cards in the pile from Hattie.
    On a side table, pinned between two bald-eagle plaster bookends, were a few old books, two volumes of Reader’s Digest condensed novels, as well as a three-volume History of the World from 1897, bound in faded red leather, an American Bible Tract, circa 1850, with broken spine. Slips of paper marked pages. A book on Scripture that contained a pull-out chart at the back, tracing the history of the Christian world from Creation to 1900, a documented span of four thousand years or so. Adam and Eve to—well, McKinley. I found a couple of worn nineteenth-century novels, with mottled gilt edges. The Wide, Wide World. The Gates Ajar.
    â€œAunt Marta’s home-correspondence school,” Karen noted as she walked by me.
    â€œBizarre collection.”
    â€œChurch sales, probably. She didn’t like to read anything that disturbed her.”
    â€œI collect old books.” I examined the thick volume of The Gates Ajar.
    â€œJoshua Jennings wanted her to read classic literature.” Karen shook her head. “Him, the old teacher and collector. He valued old books over people. Imagine Marta reading, well, I don’t know—Plutarch? Lord, Shakespeare? She moved her lips when she read supermarket tabloids. She never did read anything. He would lend her volumes, but she didn’t want to read them. She only wanted to impress him. If she returned one with a smudge, he’d flip out. Not that he gave her the collectible ones. God forbid. Books were sacred.”
    â€œBooks are sacred.”
    â€œI remember once she told me he was astounded that she’d never read James Fenimore Cooper. His favorite author. She said he yelled ‘Natty Bumppo’ at her, and she said nobody in their right mind is named Natty Bumppo. He wasn’t happy.” She chuckled at the memory.
    I laughed, too. “She started.” I pointed to the dining room table where I’d seen an unopened book resting on some newspapers. I went to get it and held it up. An exquisite volume. The Last of the Mohicans from an elegant, leather-bound set from the turn of the century. My hands lovingly handled it. A volume out of G. Putnam’s, bound in half-morocco, a silk ribbon market, unfortunately located on page two. A facsimile manuscript page.
    â€œThis is classic Victoriana,” I told her.
    â€œWhatever.”
    â€œShe didn’t get very far.”
    Karen glanced at it. “Yeah, she mentioned Cooper to me. ‘Impossible,’ she said. The first page put her to sleep.”
    I